The present invention relates to accessing electronically stored documents, and more particularly to a user interface for accessing electronically stored documents.
The increasing prevalence of electronic document storage raises the problem of providing access to electronically stored documents. One typical document retrieval interface approach is keyword searching. Another standard approach is to provide a hierarchical filing system, allowing, or rather requiring users to categorize documents into a tree structure, that then may allow efficient document recovery.
Both approaches have well-known problems. Keyword search typically returns unneeded documents in which the search term happens to appear. And the choice of a single categorization hierarchy does not support all the natural ways of viewing a database. In addition, neither of these methods facilitate application of the natural human ability to recognize documents rapidly based on general visual appearance, such as when flipping pages.
As a result, a number of other approaches have been developed. For example, there has been work in the area of retrieving documents based on icons. The user is presented with icons representing documents in a database. Based on the appearance of the icon, the user selects a particular document for display.
The representation of large document databases with icons raises new problems. Office workers must frequently process and organize large numbers of documents. Presenting the database at even the iconic size presents a substantial search problem to the user, who must then select from a large number of icons. Furthermore, different versions of a document may appear substantially similar visually making the choice of the correct icon difficult.